Thread by @GeePawHill

Change Pro-Tip: An individual's "better", when I can remember to find and support it, is the surest route to a team's "better", even when they're not the same.

When I close my eyes and think of myself, I can't help but notice all the ways I could be better. I don't know that this is a universal feature of humans, but I think it nearly so.

We seem to carry around this better self everywhere we go. We sometimes use it to bash ourselves, other times to keep us afloat, still other times to help us decide what to do, or explain what we did after we did it.

There are some remarkable things about these I-betters, so it behooves us to call them out.

The first thing is that they are *multiple*. There's not just one way I could be better, there's tons of them. In the picture, every arrow coming out of that dot is one dimension of better-ness.

The second remarkable thing: that list of betters is, well, it's a truly bizarre collection. It doesn't have themes or order. It contains items others around me would agree on. It contains items *no one* but me wishes of me.

The third remarkable thing: no two of us have exactly the same list. They're really as custom to you as your fingerprints or the shape of your ear. (Did you know the shape of your ear is so custom it's one of the ways professionals use to rapidly scan groups to find a person?)

And the fourth remarkable thing? This one's amazing. Everyone who has a bundle of those I-better vectors absolutely *thrills* to the sensation of moving along one of them.

(A cautionary note: I don't mean we neccessarily love the *effort* it takes to move along one. I mean we love the sense that, however it's happening, it *is* happening.)

So how do these four remarkable things play out when you're trying to create change?

For any change in a team, we're trying to find and achieve a T-better. (At any rate, one hopes we're not trying to make things worse.)

And here's the thing: if we can create experiences leading to that T-better that give people the sensation of moving along one of their I-betters, well, I don't know how else to put it, we *win*.

So far, everything we've said is pretty basic, and even a noob world-changer will be nodding along. But now we get to complexity, and we correspondingly get to the risk of over-simplifying our approach. That over-simplification is often what stops the noob's progress.

The complexity: the relationship -- emotional, logical, conceptual, spiritual -- between a T-better and an individual's I-better is almost entirely irrelevant.

The *only* thing that matters is that the T-better offers most of the I's in the room some movement along their own I-Better.

(And remember, create experiences not arguments, that sensation of moving along the I-better, or maybe it's time to shorten the phrasing, that "I'm growing!" sensation, isn't accessible from theory, it only comes from actual practice.)

When I settle into a team, I look around for T-betters. Every world-changer does that. But I also look around for I-betters. I look to the individuals in the room and I read the clues they give me about what might make them feel "I'm growing!" That's an olb's move, not a noob's.

Successful T-betters come from individuals in the team experiencing I-betters. Jack grows in his teaching. Billie grows in her React. Karim grows in relaxation. Priya grows in her language use. The T-better that gives them *each* their own "I'm growing!" is the right T-better.

Life is hard, and I rarely find a T-better that is a *perfect* braid of I-betters. But even a partial braid will be more successful than a single strand. If I can find T's that make no one feel worse and three of us feel growth, that's usually more than enough juice for change.

I know this can seem all very daunting. It's not an easy thing, changing the world around you. The wins are *tiny*. Patience is the central need for every coach. (It's why I'm not actively doing a coaching gig right now: I'm at an impatient time.)

But you don't have to *dominate* here. You don't have to make every T-better a perfect expression of a room's I-betters. You don't even have to know every I-better in the room. Just open yourself to looking.

It's a great route to better world-changing, because it's a smooth and continuous learning curve. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it, more or less linearly.

One piece of advice, and I'll go back to the dayjob. When you see someone having that experience, the sensation of growth, notice it with them. Reassure them that what they think might be happening to them *is* happening to them, and that you can see it.

It's a brutally hot Sunday afternoon here, and I'm hungover from a latenight drinking-and-singing-fest with my daughters.

But I feel surprisingly good. I hope you have a surprisingly good Sunday, too.